Comments Policy

--Visitors of all perspectives and backgrounds: you are most welcome to comment, please do.

--Disagree with our stance on anything? Please (1) familiarize yourself with it before mistaking us for anyone else and (2) address us with the same respect you yourself deserve. Free speech is both a right and a responsibility.

--See something in the blog or directory that needs improvement? Please do not simply criticize, but offer a practical solution to the problem.

--Trying to post a comment designed to promote a for-profit company we've never heard of before? We don't like censorship, but we will censor this.

Along with responding to our current action alerts, and participating in our Blog, you are welcome to volunteer with us.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Revisiting Some Poetry Against the Iraq War; A Contradiction That Catches at Me

Last night I was looking over a print anthology of some of the over 21,000 poets who have contributed to Poets Against the War since 2003, as the Iraq War storm was gathering. (I'm one of those poets, though I'm not in the book.) Incredulous now, five years later, the utter obliviousness of the powers that be to all these prescient cries, and all the other eloquent voices of protest from around the world.

In her contribution to this book, the veteran feminist Marge Piercy excoriates the hypocrisy of an administration that proclaims a culture of life yet is so hellbent on destroying precious lives in Iraq:

Oh, we love fetuses now, we even/dote on embryos the size of needle/tips; but people, who needs them?/Collateral damage. Babies, kids,/goat and tabby cats, old women sewing/old men praying, they'll become smoke/and blow away like sandstorms/of the precious desert covering treasure.

I share her outrage at this contradiction. Especially this week, when the ultraconservative antiabortionist Joe Scheidler claims that increasing social programs will not reduce abortion, and that prolifers who work with prochoicers on these abortion-reducing efforts are murderous betrayers of the unborn. I'd laugh if it were not for my weeping and "for shame!"ing.

But I wish I could ask Marge Piercy if the deepest and best and most shaking-up-for-the-good answer to this contradiction is to exclude embryos from the definition of "people"? What about (gulp!) defining them *in*?

Do unborn lives need to be treated as the "collateral damage" of the systematic violence against women that is the widespread denial of our right to make fully supported *nonviolent* sexual and reproductive choices--that makes disposable, "collateral damage" out of us, too?